


Dawn

by Anonymous



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Jewish Character, Nazi Character, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 14:33:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11315400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A Jew and a Nazi try to survive a cold Russian night.





	Dawn

The wind howls around the Nazi and the Jew, a cold biting thing that carries nothing but snow and the promise that it won't let up soon. The sound it makes as it buffets blue, numb lips and eyelashes crystallized with frost is a wild banshee's screech; rising and falling like the sirens in the city warning residents that planes are preparing to drop explosions up and down sleepy streets. Underneath that sound is a silence as loud as any mortar shell going off, a shush that can only be heard when the snow has made itself a blanket over the whole of the world. Hunching against the wind and the noise, the Nazi coughs lightly as if to reassure himself that his ears can pick up other sounds.

"They will come for us soon," the Nazi says in his thick German accent, fingers seeking the warmth of his armpits as he stamps his feet on the ground. "They will be looking."

The Jew says nothing, staring into the tiny flame that has become their last source of warmth. The Nazi is dressed in heavy, sleek furs atop his uniform; they are enough that the wind cannot slip underneath and run its icy hands on his chest. The Jew, however, has nothing but a threadbare jacket taken from his dead companion after the other Nazis found him kneeling over the man. _Look at this dog,_ they had laughed scornfully, _Does he not know that he, too, will die if he doesn't take the jacket? No. No, animals do not think._

Now the Nazi considers this as he tilts cyanic eyes towards the man who has not spoken the whole journey through Russia. Is it because the man doesn't know how to speak, or because he no longer has a voice with which to say anything?

Their wait in the non-silence stretches out indefinitely as the little flame sputters and then flares back up again. Its crackles are too muted to hear and every time it flickers the Nazi thinks that this will be it. He has fed it all of his papers, the full package of cigars his superior officer gave him two months ago, the strip of cloth a pretty woman had wound around his neck as she laughed at his blush while his squad mates clapped him on the back. He doesn't know why he kept it. Perhaps it was the scent of a woman to get him through lonely nights. Perhaps it was because the night he'd gotten it had been the last night he'd smiled.

Though bearing pauses in speech had long been a forte of his, the Nazi can no longer stay silent as he waits with hope that is now as small and dying as the flame before him.

"My mother used to tell me that creatures called Windigos live in snowstorms," the Nazi murmurs almost shamefully. It was not a German legend and so his mother would always shush him. _Don't tell your father; he doesn't approve of me telling tales that aren't from our history. But you should learn them, little mouse. You should learn so much._ "They are as tall as trees and wherever they walk they leave a trail of bloody footprints."

He shivers from more than the cold, remembering the stories she told about them. She told warmer stories too, ones that ended with good little German boys in the warm circle of their mothers' arms, but he cannot remember those ones as well. Some days he's found that he can't even remember his mother's face.

The Jew beside him has turned and is gazing at him with frank, unfathomable eyes that make him turn his head away for some reason. Stomp feet he can no longer feel against snow that only grows higher. They wait for an even longer time than before with nothing between them but snow, and then the Nazi almost leaps into the sky when the Jew finally speaks.

"How old are you?" the Jew asks in a voice that has gone rusty from disuse. Despite being a Russian Jew, his German is perfect. The Nazi could be angry at this fact, at the fact that for the past month they've all been speaking varying degrees of broken Russian to the man to try and coax information from him, but the Nazi can't find the energy to kindle the heat of anger. He dips his head instead.

"Twenty," he mumbles, and when there is no more response he tells the truth. "Seventeen."

The Jew's mouth flattens almost imperceptibly, his lips pressed together tightly so they don't tremble and betray any signs of weakness. The Nazi looks much younger than seventeen.

"How old are you?" the Nazi asks back, curiosity getting the better of him. He's never really spoken to a Jew before; his father had always said that Jews were too unintelligent to hold conversations with Germans. _Like our dogs._ To his mother's disapproving, sad eyes. _Throw them scraps and put them to work. That's all they are good for._

"I don't know," the Jew answers, his teeth making small clicks against each other. "I was forty. Before."

The Nazi doesn't need to ask what before means. It's strange though, that this man is only in his forties. The Jew looks much older than forty.

"What is it like?" the Nazi questions despite himself. He has always asked too many questions, gotten himself into trouble more than once.

"What?"

"You know. Being a Jew. We had a Jewess living down the street from us, and my father said that when she was out of sight she would eat all of her food with her hands. She would write letters to France telling them all about our military and she would burn German flags because she hates our country despite us giving her everything."

"Hm," the Jew says sadly, fingertips paling as he tries to bring them closer to the fire. "Do you believe him?"

The Nazi stares, and for a moment he feels a hot flash of indignation come over him. Stupid Jew. His hands ball into fists as he thinks about how easy it would be to kill the man. When his squad first found the man, they had all talked amongst themselves about what to do. The consensus was to kill him after getting information about the whereabouts of the Russians hiding in the woods, because of course a Jew would consort with their enemies. As the best speaker of Russian within the squad, the Nazi was selected to try and find that information. That had been one month ago. His excuses of why he hadn't attempted torture were getting flimsy at best near the end of a month.

The Jew sighs and curls tighter into himself while the Nazi's fists ease into open palms against the fur. When he looks back into the fire he has such an acute vision of his mother's face that his vision blurs with tears that he has to quickly blink away before they freeze. His slim physique was always lauded in Schulpforta along with hair nearly as white as the snow beneath his boots, but now he wishes he was a high official fat on greasy pork to give him extra padding against the cold.

_Do you believe him?_

He knows somewhere deep down that his anger is not at the Jew. He's just turned seventeen; he's old enough to make his own judgements about the world and so doesn't need his father's opinions on things. Yet he's continued with his squad, the relentless march across a barren Russian wasteland to smoke out enemies that the school made sound like the greatest threats Germany ever faced. All they've found so far are frightened villagers who plead for their lives before being gunned down. The Nazi doesn't think organized resistance military fighters would clutch their children sobbing while Germans shot at them. The next breath he draws in is shuddering.

"You want to take down my country, don't you?" the Nazi persists stubbornly in a quaking voice. "All of you have some secret hideout where you are just waiting to leap from?"

"There is no secret hideout," the Jew snaps harshly, more biting than the wind. "If that were so, do you not think people would've come forward to stop what's going on? Your bombs, your tanks, your _camps_?"

The Nazi has no words to answer him. He stops talking and tries to stop thinking, but doubt is something that grows much faster than a tree once the seed has been planted, and the seed has been in him long before even Schulpforta. His mother helping the Jewess from up their street to her feet after some children knocked her over. His father watching impassive as Jews, blacks, cripples, and gays were herded row after row up the street. A boy at Schulpforta breaking down into his bowl of porridge after they heard about the camps. Another boy who stopped eating and then breathing after finding out that his sixteen-year-old had been killed on the front. _The_ fuhrer _needs loyal soldiers_ , they said, _The_ fuhrer _needs brave patriots to save our country_.

Or perhaps the _fuhrer_ just needed boys who would march where they were told when they were told. Because wasn't that what they had truly been taught at Schulpforta? How to turn off their minds and follow orders?

"You don't know anything," the Nazi says in a half-whisper that the wind snatches away and hurls with force into the snow-globe night.

"I know what it's like to be a Jew," the Jew says firmly. "And I know that both of us would rather be home with our families than out here in Death's country. Because that is what humans want; to be safe with their families. Your father and your _fuhrer_ can say all they like about us, but we want that too. We are also human."

"You have a family?"

"I have a wife, and a girl, and a boy who was the same age as you last I saw him. I don't know where they are now, or even if they are. All I know is that if I had the chance to save all of my country or to be with them, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat. I would choose even a minute more with them. A second, to kiss my Sveta's forehead, lay my hand upon my Aleksander's shoulder, brush my Olga's hair from her face. All I want is someone to go back to."

Quite a different picture than the Nazi's father and superiors had painted for him. He remembers his mother watching the people being paraded down the street and collapsing against the doorway, one hand stark white against the oak doorjamb. _No, no, no,_ _this is not so._ Her hair flying behind her as she ran to the street. _Stop this! Stop this! Let these people free!_ Pounding her fists against the chest of a huge Nazi officer. _You let them go!_

"I want my mother," the Nazi says with the voice of a boy. His father had dragged her away with apologies, and then the doctors had come and given her so much medicine that she could scarcely lift her lids. The Nazi wondered if she was still in the house they'd put her in, a string of drool hanging from a mouth that used to hold the brightest smiles. He wonders if his father still goes to visit her or if his father is too busy shining his black, black boots before marching around a camp with his tiny cruel eyes and arrogant swagger.

"Don't we all?" The Jew sounds exhausted as the flame coughs once, twice, and then abruptly goes out. In a darkness broken up only by the white from the snow, the Nazi's heart begins to pound. He fancies that he hears the Windigo out there looking for him, blood filling up its steps as its massive head swings from left to right. It will come and it will eat out his guts, sucking on them like spaghetti noodles steaming hot to warm the belly on a cold night. The Nazi crouches down and wraps his arms around his knees, quaking. If only the Russians hadn't decided to attack his squad during a snow squall. If only they hadn't all been separated, only him and the Jew left together to fend for themselves. He is scared to die. He's scared the Devil will come for him for all of the terrible things he's done. Though he's never yet been able to kill a man, he's done nothing to stop the others. Maybe he deserves this.

"Are you frightened?" The Jew's voice sounds eerie, and the Nazi wonders if maybe the Jew was the Windigo all along. He feels an arm crawl across his back and waits for the tearing pain of a hand digging around in his midsection, looking for tasty organs. Instead the arm stays there and the weight warms him just a little, enough that he perks up to find the Jew watching him warily with his arm hovering out. "We are always frightened, us Jews. We always feel that Windigos are out to get us."

The Nazi blinks slowly, as if caught in thick amber liquid. Then he folds against the Jew's side and they huddle together for warmth, the Nazi briefly closing his eyes to imagine the man's arms are his mother's while the Jew closes his eyes to imagine the boy's body is his son's. The longer the night stretches, the clearer it becomes that they will both die here, frozen together in a desolate wasteland far from home.

"I'm sorry," the Nazi breathes to the Jew, to God, to his mother. "I'm sorry."

The Jew doesn't attempt to forgive him because there are some things that cannot be forgiven, but he doesn't move away either. The closer they get to dawn and death, the younger the Nazi seems to be. Tears freeze on his cheeks, his entire body shudders with silent sobs and cold, and he presses his face into the jacket of the Jew like a child hiding from the world.

"Do you think your God will send me to hell?" the Nazi asks quietly when his sobs abate and they both stop shivering. The Jew doesn't answer for so long that the Nazi thinks he's died, until finally his voice comes, resigned, out of the dark.

"It's not for me to say; I don't know everything you've done. All I know is that God tends to forgive children a little easier, and I think that, although you've left being a child behind, you're also not an adult."

The Nazi nods as if this is the best he could want or hope for. The sound of the wind rises and falls. The darkness is a steady, living thing, but the Nazi no longer worries about Windigos. The Jews are not the Windigos; it's not their footsteps that are filled with blood. Twice the Nazi falls asleep, and twice he is awoken by the stout Jew. The third time he begins to nod off, he realizes that Jew has fallen asleep before him. He rouses the man slightly, astonished to find that the reason they've both almost slept is because the wind is no longer blowing. When he squints now, he can also make out the Jew's silhouette looking grayish, fuzzy in a light that's beginning to wake up. There is a chance they will be found now if only they can stay awake. They can't stay awake, not both of them for very long. The Jew nods off again and the Nazi thinks of his mother. He knows what he has to do. He smiles one last time.

* * *

 

The Jew wakes up to his shoulder being shaken, starting up with fear in his eyes like a horse that's been spooked. It's only after he recognizes a Russian uniform that he allows himself to relax very slightly, sallow cheeks caving more as he sighs in relief. The man who has woken him tells him that the Germans have nearly been stopped, that the Jew can come further into Russia and wait out the rest of the war until his home area has been liberated. His wife and children who had gone ahead of him could be waiting for him there. He might be able to hold them again.

He moves to stand from where he's fallen asleep crouched over the snow, and it is only then that he realizes the Nazi has gone stiff. When he looks at the man - boy - he's spent the last month with, he is almost overcome with confusion. The boy is even smaller than before, skin looking waxy in the weak morning sun that illuminates a faint smile on his lips. How could the Jew have survived when the Nazi did not?

A second realization comes to him a moment after the first as he looks down and takes in his own clothing. Furs haphazardly jammed over his worn clothes, the coat of a German uniform wrapped around his feet. He understands, and he does not. Of course, that's what the entire war is, so there's no point in trying to understand completely.

Lifting a hand speckled with black - he will lose five fingers between both hands, three toes, parts of his face - he reaches down and closes the boy's eyes. Then he stands facing the sunrise and takes his first unsteady steps back to Russia. He will meet his family again, and he will meet more Russians who will ask him how he managed to survive being captured by Nazis and then waiting out the cold. And what will he tell them all, his family and the Russians who ask how a Jew captured by Nazis managed to survive one of Russia's cold, unforgiving nights?

The truth. He will tell them the truth; not that he was saved by a Nazi in the darkest part of the night. He will tell them that he was saved by a boy as light began to crest the horizon, and that sometimes war makes people do inexplicable things.

 


End file.
